On my bi-weekly posting schedule, I’m two days late posting this and without much excuse. I just forgot that it was due!  Or I could argue that I was distracted by traveling and Halloween.

I had a lovely and smooth airplane trip (for once) to Philadelphia and back last weekend for a wedding ceremony of a great musician with whom I’ve worked — me as composer, him as performer — for many years. There was a veritable who’s who of his other close musical friends there, including three distinguished symphony conductors, and a convivial time was had by all, and the groom and his new bride appreciated that so many people invested the trouble to come in from out of town. The weather was lovely, and the food was great, including a ten-course Italian dinner after the wedding. I had never met two of the conductors but found I had many mutual acquaintances and experiences in common with both of them, and naturally I didn’t fail to give them some CD’s of my symphonic music.

It is officially jacket weather here in Nashville, marked by the annual turning off of the backyard fountain for the winter. Soon I’ll be putting out dried corn for the deer and other critters, but they still have plenty of acorns in the front yard from our two big oaks to munch on, for now. I look forward to having a fire in our fireplace, as soon as we have enough free time to actually sit in front of it.

I am most thrilled to finally announce that the perfect choreographer for our upcoming ballet (June 2024) has officially signed on. His name is Arcadian Broad. Also, the principal dancer of the New York City Ballet, Isabella LaFreniere, will dance our principal title role of Raffaella. I shared her bio in an earlier entry. Both of them have a web site. Here is his bio: Upon a foundation as a highly accomplished ballet dancer, himself, Arcadian Broad has successfully choreographed over 35 premiered ballets. He has choreographed for Orlando Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet, Sarasota Ballet, DanceWorks Chicago, Olympic Ballet Theater, and others. His experience choreographing fairytale ballets, including Beauty and the Beast and Wonderland: Mad Tales of the Hatter, well suits our fairytale treatment of Raffaella: A Tragic Ballet in Two Acts.

As usual, Crystal and I bought candy to give out on Halloween and Crystal carved a lovely jack-o-lantern, but our street with it’s big lots didn’t get a single spook. Never has in our thirteen years here. Too far for kids to walk around, I guess. For Halloween dinner, Crystal asked me to make my pumpkin soup, with pumpkin puree, chicken stock, sage, mushrooms, sausage, and marsala wine, which came out better than usual, I think. I make it every year.

Tomorrow night we go to a local performance of Macbeth (Shakespeare’s original spoken play). They may or may not be using some of the music between scenes that I wrote for a Macbeth ballet some time ago, we shall see, I’m happy regardless. Either way, it’s going to be a well-done show, as was their production of As You Like It, in which Crystal played the lead female role of Rosalind (and incognito as Ganymede).  Crystal now continues to rehearse the role of Betty (the Rosemary Clooney role) in another local production (for December) of the musical White Christmas.

Funny, for my airplane trip to Philly, I got some CD’s (i.e., books on “tape”) from the nearby public library and took with me a “disc man” player. Does anyone remember those? I found it so much easier to use than my now-broken MP3 player, which was so “conveniently” tiny that to read on its tiny screen what it’s playing required both my reading glasses and a magnifying glass, and then I struggled with tiny buttons to get it to play the right track. Give me… Old School! 

During the past week I have actually composed the introduction for the fourth and final movement of my new Symphony No. 3: “English.”  This movement is titled “The Major Oak of Sherwood Forest.” As I’m about to dig back into finishing up the ballet, it may be a while before I complete this movement, but I am pleased with the intro. And so I’ll get this posted and hope to see you again in two weeks!